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Strauss: No comfort in losing bonus

Edinburgh Rugby have secured three losing bonus points on the road this season, all from their last three successive away outings.

Losses to Connacht, Scarlets and Treviso have all been tantalisingly close for the men in black, who have stuck fast to their faith in the incremental improvements made by the squad, first at home, with green shoots appearing on the road.

Despite these improvements however, the disappointment in the immediate aftermath was palatable in conversation with captain and centre Andries Strauss, who recounted his side’s most recent missed opportunities.

He said: “We came in at half time feeling quite content with the lead in spite of spoiling two opportunities to score tries.

“Unfortunately, towards the middle part of the second-half, we moved away from our strategy and went out of system a bit, which meant we had to defend out of system.

“This allowed Treviso to get into our half quite consistently and retain the ball, through which they scored two tries.

“That’s where we lost that game, by giving them too many opportunities to play in our half, and well done to them, they capitalised on that.”

All in all it was a very disappointing result for us because we really believed could have won that one and, to be quite frank, we should have.”

- - Edinburgh Rugby centre Andries Strauss

“As a team we are good enough to have won all of those games [Connacht, Scarlets and Treviso] and it’s unfortunate that we didn’t manage to do that, but the positive for this is that we know this is a process.

“We are a fairly new team playing together at the moment.

“We are definitely building towards something. We know what our end goal is and we are taking small steps towards reaching that goal.

We can look at it as three bonus points on the road, but ultimately we are capable of winning those games.

If we stick to what we are supposed to, we will start winning those games in the not too distant future.”

No respite...

While the majority of the RaboDirect PRO12 takes a break for the knockout rounds of the Heineken Cup, Edinburgh Rugby will play their two games in hand, starting with Dragons this Thursday (3 April, kick-off 6.30pm, live on BBC ALBA), followed by the 1872 Cup decider against Glasgow Warriors the following weekend.